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Thursday, October 21, 2004

After stunning reversal, Yankees take AL pennant

In what analysts are calling a “bold” and “decisive” move, President George W. Bush today signed an executive order declaring the Boston Red Sox retroactively ineligible for post-season play, thereby awarding the American League pennant to the New York Yankees.

“I said it in 1993, and I’ll say it again today,” Bush told a group of admirers, each of whom had written a 2000-word essay on why they should be allowed to bask in the glory of his presence, “the wild card is bad for baseball.  I said that history would prove me right, and it has.  It always does.  Don’t ask me about ‘mistakes,’ young lady-- that’s a trick question, and don’t think I don’t know it.  The wild card is an exercise in folly, and it must be stopped now before it weakens our nation any further.”

Bush’s remarkable, bold, and also decisive decision came only hours after the Boston Red Sox had scrambled back from a 3-0 deficit to defeat the Yankees in four straight games, winning the climactic game seven in a rout.  The Sox’ dramatic rally was unprecedented in major league baseball history, as is the President’s subsequent reversal of the outcome.

“People don’t want to see a second-place team crowned ‘League Champions,’” Bush explained.  “You can’t send mixed messages.  You can’t flip flop and say, ‘well, one team won one thing but another team won another.’ It doesn’t show leadership.  It doesn’t show resolve.”

Asked by one timid, quivering supporter whether the executive order would also apply to the Florida Marlins, effectively stripping them of their 1997 and 2003 World Series victories, Bush replied that the playoff outcomes of previous years lay outside federal jurisdiction.  “I believe in freedom, and I think you have to leave those decisions up to the individual states,” said a fiercely smiling Bush, who has longstanding family connections in Florida.  The questioner was promptly led away in handcuffs and charged with criminal impertinence.

In Sacramento, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger followed Bush’s remarks with a press release stating that Republican stronghold Anaheim will be permitted to retain its World Series victory in 2002 rather than cede it to the “girlie-men” of San Francisco.

The Yankees will open the World Series on Saturday against either the St. Louis Cardinals or the Houston Astros.  The National League championship series is not affected by the executive order.

Posted by Michael on 10/21 at 01:30 AM
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Wednesday, October 20, 2004

Game 7!

Now that the Red Sox have accomplished the unthinkable (well, the unthinkable in baseball-- we hockey fans get to see teams come back from 3-0 to force a game 7 about once a generation, and the Islanders did it in back-to-back series in 1975), there’s no way they can lose this year!  I mean, I don’t want to jinx them or anything, but they are clearly a Team of Destiny on a Date with History!

Unless maybe they bring in Pedro to pitch on one day’s rest in the bottom of the 19th with the score 7-7 because there’s no one left in the bullpen and they don’t want to hand the ball to Mientkiewicz or somebody.  You never know.  It could happen.

Posted by Michael on 10/20 at 01:46 AM
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Tuesday, October 19, 2004

Let’s get this guy a job

I’m sure you’re all aware of the latest Sinclair news:

BALTIMORE (AP)—Sinclair Broadcast fired its Washington bureau chief, saying he revealed company business when he discussed its upcoming program on a documentary critical of John Kerry’s anti-Vietnam War activities.

Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc. said in a statement late Monday that it fired reporter Jon Leiberman and that “we are disappointed that Jon’s political views caused him to violate company policy and speak to the press about company business.’’

In his initial remarks, published Monday by The (Baltimore) Sun, Leiberman called the Sinclair show “biased political propaganda, with clear intentions to sway this election.’’

But what can we do about it?

In the longstanding tradition of offering my readers only two choices, I propose that we:

(a) wait for the May 2005 C-SPAN symposium featuring senior editors from major dailies and all three non-android networks, “Should We Have Been More Skeptical of the Swift Boat Veterans”?

(b) begin suggesting new jobs in mass media that might be suitable for Jon Lieberman.  Dazzlingly alert reader T. C. from Oklahoma writes in to point out that the position of F.C.C. chairman might be nice.  Apparently, right now the post is being held by some discredited Cabinet official’s hapless kid.

However, other suggestions are welcome.  I hear the Washington Post could use a media analyst.

Posted by Michael on 10/19 at 10:02 AM
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On the right

Yesterday this humble blog devoted its attention to the left.  Today it’s the right’s turn!

First, in national news, the GOP has officially declared October to be “Homophobia Month”!  That’s now 306 consecutive homophobia months on the official Republican calendar, dating back to the very first one in May 1979.  Check out this lovely item by the talented Michelle Goldberg in Salon on Ohio’s ballot initiative Issue 1, which stipulates that the state “shall not create or recognize a legal status for relationships of unmarried individuals that intends to approximate the design, qualities, significance or effect of marriage.” So much for partner health benefits, visitation rights, and all private contracts between cohabiting gay persons!  Let freedom reign-- someplace else!

Second, it’s time to update our What do you like most about Bush? quiz.  Faithful readers of this lowly blog will remember the first version of this quiz, posted on this site in late May:

What is it you like most about the Bush administration and its policies?

___ I like the lying! It turned me on when the President spiked that EPA report on the toxic air quality around Ground Zero, thereby consigning thousands of firefighters, police, Guardsmen, rescue workers, and ordinary citizens to debilitating lifelong respiratory illness!  If people are so worried about a few tiny particles floating around, let them buy those little fiber masks, for goodness’ sake!  Every Ace Hardware sells ‘em.

___ I like the incompetence! It’s so cool the way the President and his advisors blew off legitimate CIA and DIA intelligence on Iraq, and decided instead to take the word of an Iraqi double agent who’s working together with Iranian Islamists.  The post-"Mission Accomplished” occupation of Iraq has been every bit as cool!

___ I like the torture! I came for the tax cuts, but I’m staying for the torture and humiliation of random Arabs from Gitmo to Abu Ghraib!  It’s such a pleasant surprise, and so damn long overdue!  That’ll show whoever-they-all-are that you don’t mess with the U.S.!

___ I like the cuts to veterans’ benefits! Why should a bunch of veterans get all those free medical goodies?  I support the troops, sure, but only by flying a flag from my car.  Don’t come around here asking me to pay more taxes just because some soldier comes home with the sniffles.

___ I like the attacks on overtime pay! I’m sick and tired of people freeloading off the rest of us by working ten or twelve hours a day.  And I’m sick and tired of the way Democrats pander to their special interests.  It’s about time we had a President tough enough to draw the line when it comes to outrageous labor demands!

___ I like the $500 billion deficit! Clinton made me sick with all his feelgood liberal talk about “balancing” the so-called “budget.” Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter!

___ I like the new Medicare plan! Though I wish someone would explain it to me.  What’s this about donuts being covered after two thousand dollars?

___ I like the cowboy hat! I also like the whole Crawford ranch brush-clearing thing.  I think it’s shameful that Bill Clinton left him all that brush to clear.

___ Could you repeat the question? I wasn’t really paying attention.

Back in May, of course, this abject blog had a mere 1000 readers per day, as opposed to the Atrios-fueled 14,000 we welcomed yesterday (personally, I think the whole “Duncan Black” thing is a ruse-- I still say he’s really Sidney Blumenthal, and Christopher Hitchens agrees with me).  But now we have to strike that last option, since everyone is paying attention, and we have to add some post-convention, post-debate options as well.  So:

___ I like the wisdom in the ways of science! It’s about time we had a President who will burn witches if they weigh the same as a duck!

___ I like the yelling! We haven’t had a good Zell-raising, podium-pounding President since Teddy Roosevelt rode his Bull Moose into the sunset!  When Bush starts screaming at people who ask him questions, he lets me know he’s keeping America safe-- from Americans!

___ I like the banana-republic-strongman tactics! It really pisses me off when a couple of holier-than-thou schoolteachers show up at a Bush rally wearing T-shirts that say “protect our civil liberties”! Bless the President for apprehending these loony-left Fifth Columnists and ushering their asses out the door!  Bless the Vice President for having a 54-year-old woman charged with criminal trespass for uttering the word “no” at one of his rallies!  “We chose this phrase specifically because we didn’t think it would be offensive or degrading or obscene,” said Tania Tong, 34, a special education teacher. Yeah, right!  Just like that broad who asked Bush about his “mistakes” in the second debate didn’t know that she was asking a goddamn trick question! If these government-school liberals love Saddam so much, why don’t they ask him to protect their “civil” “liberties”?

And last but not least:

___ I like the steadfastness in the face of terror! I know that President Bush will keep me safe from terrorists who want to destroy our way of life!  Every day, in my own town, I am terrorized by gays and les . . . gays and lesb . . . gays and you-know-whats who demand that I accept their “lifestyle” and give them special rights!  Only George Bush has the courage to hunt these people down and stop them-- while John Kerry wants to feed them a yes-no-maybe bowl of mush!

Remember, dear readers, somewhere between 44 and 49 percent of your fellow Americans are checking one or more of these boxes every day.  (To understand the discrepancies among recent polls, see Tom Burka’s erudite metastatistical explanation of the Gallup method.) So let’s get everyone else out to the polls, OK? 

Kerry/Edwards-- for a saner America.

Posted by Michael on 10/19 at 07:08 AM
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Monday, October 18, 2004

For all US progressives thinking of voting for someone other than Kerry

Maybe you’re fond of speaking of the “corporate duopoly” of American politics-- and I admit that the phrase does roll nicely off the tongue.  Or maybe you like to imagine that there’s a groundswell of hundreds of millions of people around the globe who believe that Kerry and Bush are just two different brands of detergent, even though actual polls show wide margins of support for Kerry in other nations.  Or maybe you just think it’s smart, cool, and alternative to dismiss both guys as “millionaires” or “Skull and Bones men,” because you know better than to buy into “the system.”

But your political stance really means one of two things.  Either:

(a) you are unaware of the extent to which the Bush crowd consists of kleptomaniac Contra-funding retreads, neo-segregationists associated with Confederate outlets like Southern Partisan magazine and the Council of Conservative Citizens, and Christian fundamentalist jihadists who believe themselves to be the instruments of God; or

(b) you are sublimely indifferent to the fact that the Bush crowd consists of kleptomaniac Contra-funding retreads, neo-segregationists associated with Confederate outlets like Southern Partisan magazine and the Council of Conservative Citizens, and Christian fundamentalist jihadists who believe themselves to be the instruments of God.

If you fall under (a), no problem!  We progressives will be happy to take you back.  Just spend the next two weeks catching up on world and US history since 2000-- we’ll wait right here.  If you fall under (b), please be sure to say so in all future correspondence.  It would especially help if you began all letters, emails, speeches, essays, books, and other “interventions” by saying, “I am a crusader for peace and social justice for all peoples, but in 2004 I could not be bothered to concern myself with the question of whether the world’s most powerful nation would continue to be run by evangelical Christian nutcases and far-right sociopaths.” That way, the rest of us will know just how seriously we’re supposed to take you.  Thanks!

Posted by Michael on 10/18 at 03:02 AM
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Sunday, October 17, 2004

Reality-based community news

There’s a weird new science-fiction piece by Ron Suskind in today’s New York Times Magazine.  In it, a Messianic madman takes over the United States in a disputed election after a hapless time traveller accidentally crushes a butterfly ballot while hunting for dinosaurs in the Cretaceous period.  Unable to distinguish Sweden from Switzerland (insisting, to one stunned congressman, that Sweden is “the neutral one” that “has no army"), the madman gradually consolidates his power, banishes all those who doubt or question him, and dispatches “senior advisers” to inform the populace that he can bend all of spacetime to his will.  Suskind writes:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend—but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Basically, it’s Alex Proyas’s film Dark City rewritten as a political thriller.  Derivative, but compelling.  The stuff about the madman’s crazed, cultish followers is good too, though a little overdone.  Throwing in a stock character who says “I just believe God controls everything, and God uses the president to keep evil down” and “God gave us this president to be the man to protect the nation at this time” is heavy-handed, I think.  But overall, as a depiction of an alternate universe inhabited by the insane, it’s pretty interesting stuff from an outlet that doesn’t usually publish much in the genre.

UPDATE:  Alert readers have directed me to Suskind’s most likely source of inspiration, and it’s not a film at all!  Well, apparently there are some SF writers out there with really lurid imaginations.  But those of us in the reality-based community can’t be expected to treat these outlandish fantasies as “serious” literature.

Posted by Michael on 10/17 at 07:50 AM
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